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Indexed News on:

--the California "Mega-Park" Project

Tracking measurable success on efforts across California to preserve and connect our Parks & Wildlife CorridorsWE POST NEWS THREE WAYS:1. long detailed stories on blogspot (here!)2. short messages on Twitter3. automated news feeds from CA enviro websites in the right-hand column which change frequently and are not archived by our website (that's why we now have a twitter account to permanently capture the memorable feeds)

SCOTIA, CALIF. -- Beneath the gnarled green-needled boughs of the NorthCoast redwoods, a remarkable encounter one recent day shook the roots of the forest's fiercest struggle.

A top timber company executive hiked into the woods with a message for the latest generation of tree sitters perched on platforms high in the massive limbs of the ancient trees they've campaigned to protect.

Come down out of the sky, he told them. The war is over.

…Pacific Lumber under Hurwitz mowed down trees in vast clear cuts to maximize profits and hungered to cut mammoth thousand-year-old trees; the new company intends to wield the chain saw far more selectively on its sprawling 328 square miles of coastal forest and won't cut any redwood born prior to 1800 with a diameter of 4 feet or more….cutting no more wood per year than the forest can grow…

A new Earth First! tree-sit in a Green Diamond Resource (formerly known as Simpson Timber) logging plan east of Eureka ended as suddenly as it began

….Three days later, a Green Diamond employee returned to mark the occupied tree and at least two other imperiled Old-Growth Redwoods as “Wildlife Leave Trees”, seeming to indicate that they won’t be cut. This surprised EF! Humboldt activists because the California Department of Forestry had already approved the logging plan. While the activists suspected it was a deceptive move to trick the tree-sitters into coming down, another piece of information came to light.

An Earth First!er reviewing the logging plan document discovered that Green Diamond would not be allowed to log the area until next February 19th at the earliest. This is due to the fact that lumber companies are required by California law to allow trees in adjacent clearcuts to reach three years of age before logging neighboring forests.

The Earth First!ers decided to remove the platform and gear from the tree, assess the new situation and re-calibrate the defensive strategy for the threatened groves.

“At least now they know we’re serious,” said a tree-sitter by the name of “Crossroads”.

With the sale of Pacific Lumber Company to Don Fisher's Humboldt Redwood Company, the longstanding and fabled tree-sits of Humboldt County—home to some 40 percent of all remaining old-growth redwood forests—may be ending.

Humboldt Redwood Company has promised to embrace sustainable logging practices, and has engaged in direct talks with the current generation of tree-sitters.

The redwood wars preceded me and the redwood wars outlasted my time in Humboldt, but this month I can finally say that the biggest of them - the war with Pacific Lumber, once controlled by Charles Hurwitz, the junk bond king, the man who would have cut them all down at once if he could have - that war is over. And the trees, and the people of Humboldt, won.